Among the things I learned this week:
* Gum is forbidden at (some?) drum ‘n’ bass events. (Courtesy: Hospital Podcast 344)
* Open and shared office plans make you sick. And if you have to share, better do so with two to five other people. (Courtesy: Pejtersen JH1, Feveile H, Christensen KB, Burr H.)
* Crowdsourced verification platforms, such as Check. (Courtesy: Bellingcat)
* The history of tuning to A440. (Courtesy: Matthew Guerrieri/Red Bull Music Academy)
Among the things I learned this week:
* The history of the sports bra. (Courtesy: 99% Invisible)
* Spotify uses NLP with data from monitoring the Web to help with song recommendations. (Courtesy: Sophia Ciocca/HackerNoon)
* Students who don’t bring their phone to class, earn a letter-grade better than those who do. (Courtesy: Nicholas Carr/WSJ)
Among the things I learned this week:
* The Wikipedia post for Chinese Crested Dog should have a dispute banner, perhaps (Courtesy: Personal Experience):
* Habermas’ take on the Internet (Courtesy: Economist):
Digital communication, he wrote a few years ago, has unequivocal democratic merits only in authoritarian countries, where it undermines the government’s information monopoly. Yet in liberal regimes, online media, with their millions of forums for debate on a vast range of topics, could lead to a “fragmentation of the public” and a “liquefaction of politics”, which would be harmful to democracy.
* We’re so post-PC that reviews of next-gen computer equipment now include commentary on the aesthetics and space challenges of a computer (Courtesy: Brian X. Chen, NYT):
The Rift works with technology that some might find anachronistic: a Windows PC, monitor, keyboard and mouse. With many people shifting away from desktop computers toward laptops, tablets and smartphones, finding a place to install the Rift and those other components may be a challenge. In my modest San Francisco apartment, I set up the system in the living room next to my television set. What an eyesore.
There are other similar aspects to the article, in case you want to learn something this week.